It was the most challenging, terrifying and thrilling 24 hours of my career here in the Okanagan.
Sunday afternoon was passing by as it did most weekends. Our cameras had been out shooting various events happening around the Okanagan during the day and all of us were back in-house putting together the 5:30 newscast. It was a fairly standard weekend, with nothing too crazy happening. It was the calm before the storm I suppose you could say.
Then the phone rang. It was a viewer with a news tip: she had seen smoke coming from Peachland just off the Okanagan Connector. We get lots of calls about smoke sightings but for some reason, I felt this one was a little different.
I called the Kamloops Fire Service, which covers our area, and asked what they knew about it. They said, it was about one hectare in size and they were sending crews to the scene. As soon as I got off the phone, the scanners in our newsroom seemed to explode. There were squawks about the fire spreading and soon, fire departments from around the Central Okanagan were being dispatched to Trepanier Road. This was turning into something big, I thought to myself.
We sent out cameraman Steve Beskidny to capture whatever he could. And as soon as he saw the smoke, Rick Webber came down to the station to help out. Then came the challenging part: getting information. When news breaks so suddenly, emergency officials have to scramble to deal with the situation and often there isn’t anyone left behind to talk to media. Things were developing so fast, information about the fire kept on changing but we knew these facts: there was a wildfire and it was threatening homes.
When we went on the air at 5:30, I was very excited. This was the biggest breaking news story I had ever anchored. But with every breaking news situation, there are challenges. Heavy smoke and traffic had backed up traffic and cameraman Steve was having trouble getting back to the station. But viewers were e-mailing us pictures of the fire, which we showed on the air, and we shared the most imporant information we had at that point: that it was burning out of control.
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Right after we got off the air, information started pouring in from the Regional District about evacuation orders and evacuation centres. The newsroom had exploded with people during the 30 minutes I was in the studio and soon we were dispatching reporters and cameramen out into the field. I went into my second breaking news newscast at 6:30 with more information and more confidence. But this fire seemed to be raging and I was worried about what it might do.
As the night went on, I knew this was turning into one of the biggest stories of the year for the valley. More than 1,500 people evacuated. Hundreds of homes threatened. A fire ripping through hectares upon hectares. I knew affected residents would want to know where they should go and whether the fire was big enough to affect school the next day so I began putting information up on our website, writing story after story so people would know what they should do and where was safe to go.
I slept very little that night and got in very early the next morning. I updated our website with the latest details about the fire and soon saw a press conference was going to be held later that morning. I coordinated efforts with the web team at our sister station in Vancouver to live stream the media update on our website and Tweet and Facebook simultaneously.
Emergency officials had arranged a tour of the fire zone for media Monday afternoon. It was very gracious of them though it felt like we were all on a very bizarre school trip. Media from all major networks as well as local media piled into a city bus and jumped out as we were shepherded to four different spots within the fire zone.
I had been to the scene of fires before but nothing on this level. At each stop, I could not help but feel so powerless as I witnessed how destructive the interface fire had been. Trees severely charred. Entire sections of brush and grass completely wiped out. Homes and streets covered in red retardant dropped from helicopters working to save property.
At one particular stop, I could see firefighters putting out hot spots and there was a very distinctive line of where they had managed to stop the fire: mere metres away from a house. It was unnerving to see how bad this fire could have gotten and I was proud of how hard our firefighters had worked to save homes.
At the final stop of the fire zone, media were shown one of the houses that had been destroyed by the flames. A log cabin with a nearby carriage home was the unfortunate victim of the fire’s wrath. There was little left of the houses, but I could see an ironing board, a sofa and a microwave. This had once been someone’s house, which they had laboured over building and spent time decorating. Now it was just a pile of rubble.
And unbelievably, right beside it was a completely intact and untouched house. It seemed the fire had a mind of its own and acted randomly in what it took down. I couldn’t help but feel upset with it since one family would return home to everything and another would return home to nothing.
As the day wound down, I updated our website with photo galleries, web stories and the videos I had taken while out in the field. The fire seemed to be under control now and for that, I breathed a sigh of relief. As I reflected back on what the last 24 hours had been like, I realized how much had happened and how many new experiences I had had. I had been challenged in my capacity as a reporter and anchor, I had gone inside a fire zone, I had seen up close how fierce the elements could be. I had worked through my first real, real wildfire in the Okanagan and lived to tell about it.
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